IBM unveil green optical network tech prototype

ming_nuaa

IBM researchers unveil green optical network technology prototype
The new technology uses light instead of wires to transmit
information. This could allow, for example, the transmission of 8 terabits of
data per second—equivalent to about 5,000 high-definition video streams—using
the power of a single 100-Watt lightbulb.
Bandwidth of this magnitude could greatly enhance the energy efficiencies of
entire data centers and accelerate the sharing of large datasets. The potential
advantages are far-reaching. Whether it's scientists crunching data to discover
new drugs or to forecast the weather, people sharing high-definition movies on
various devices, doctors sending high-definition medical images to a specialist
for diagnosis within seconds while the patient is still in the office, or
bringing the power of high-definition to mobile phones, the enormous bandwidth
capacity of this new technology could change the way we work and live.
In the context of so-called green computing initiatives, the new optical
technology could save massive amounts of power in supercomputers. For a typical
100-meter-long link, the power consumed by this new optical technology is 100
times less than today’s electrical interconnects. This translates into a power
savings of 10 times over current commercial optical modules.
The new
prototype, called a "green optical link", is designed to meet the bandwidth
requirements of petaflop and even exaflop supercomputing. As such, it
constitutes a significant leap from related work announced by the same research
team just one year ago. The new technology combines optical chips and optical
data buses into a single package together with standard components.
"Last year we introduced an optical transceiver chip set that had the
capability to transmit a high-defintion movie in less than one second using
highly customized parts and processes. Just a year later, we've now connected
these high-speed chips through printed circuit boards with dense integrated
optical “wiring”. Now we have built an even faster transceiver not with custom
pieces, but using all standard, commercially available parts and tools,"
explains IBM researcher Clint Schow. "These aren't theoretical experiments or
chips sitting in unique conditions in a lab, but rather chipsets that could hit
the market in the next two years. The innovation lies in the fact that we are
making optics with the same kind of packaging as electronics."
The
optically-enabled circuit boards, called "optocards", employ an array of
low-loss polymer optical waveguides to conduct light between transmitters and
receivers. This technology was developed by scientists at IBM's Zurich Research
Lab. The complete databus constructed with such optocards not only incorporates
a large number of high-speed channels, but also packs them to an unprecedented
density: each waveguide channel is smaller in diameter than a human hair. The
packaging approach for the complete system is unique in that it utilizes hybrid
chip integration to produce a highly integrated optical module, called an
"optochip".
Applications from cell phones to supercomputers, from
electronics to healthcare
The applications for this technology range
from cell phones to supercomputers and span industries from consumer electronics
to healthcare.
High-definition video: As high-definition video
becomes increasingly widespread, the new optochip technology will facilitate
video sharing and video on-demand by dramatically increasing the bandwidth of
video servers. Web-serving sites that host videos could use the technology to
access libraries containing millions of high-definition movies and video clips
within a few seconds, thereby accelerating access greatly.
Patient care: Physicians and researchers will be able to send
high-definition images such as MRIs and heart scans—which are huge files—for
real-time analysis and 3-D visualization.
Consumer electronics:
Scaled-down versions of the optical interconnect technology may find
applications in a range of consumer products. For example, in cell phones, one
chip could reside in the base of the phone and another in the display. This
would allow very large files, even high-definition content, to move from onechip
to the other. The advantage of this is that, by using optics instead of wires,
the display can be turned up and down or from side to side without being impeded
by electrical wires.
By incorporating an optical data port in laptops,
high-definition video recorders, personal mp3 and video players, cell phones,
and PDAs, high-definition video content can be stored and displayed on
high-resolution external screens.
The improved bandwidth of data
interconnects will enable massively parallel supercomputers to have a profound
impact in many fields. Potential applications range from improved molecular
dynamics calculations, accelerated drug development processes, more accurate
weather/climate modeling, as well as advancing our understanding of subnuclear
physics such as in the field of quantum chromodynamics.
The prototype
revealed by IBM scientists today is the world’s fastest and most highly
integrated optical data bus to day. By connecting a staggering number of
high-performance computers, it has the potential to achieve unprecedented
performance levels.
Specifications behind IBM's new green optical
network technology
The optochip is a multicomponent 3-D assembly
constructed by means of conventional surface-mount solder processes similar to
those currently used in the mass-production of electrical chips. The 10
Gb/channel databus is the first demonstration of an integrated module-to-module,
32-channel optical datalink on a printed circuit board. The need for
high-bandwidth photonic communications between chips or modules has been
discussed in the technical literature for more than a decade, and various pieces
of the pertinent technology have been introduced. IBM has now assembled a fully
functional and integrated solution, significantly advancing the field of
chip-level optical interconnects. By proving the viability of high-density
parallel optics, IBM has accelerated the prospect of real-world deployment of
practical, high-capacity interconnects between chips.
In addition to the
optical data bus, IBM also has developed a parallel optical transceiver module
with a higher number of channels and an increased speed of operation: 24
transmitters and 24 receivers that each operate at 12.5 Gb/s. The resulting
total bidirectional data transfer rate is an unprecedented 300 Gb/s, nearly
twice the performance of earlier generations. Compared to current commercial
optical modules, the transceiver provides 10 times greater bandwidth in
one-tenth of the volume while consuming comparable power. To enable low-cost
volume production, the new transceiver uses standard 850-nm vertical-cavity
surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), high-speed versions of the inexpensive devices
found in a typical computer mouse. By focusing on innovative packaging of
low-cost and low-power technologies such as VCSELs and CMOS chips, IBM Research
is paving the way to the widespread adoption of optical communications.
IBM has a long history of research into high-bandwidth parallel optics.
The current breakthrough was achieved as part of a DARPA-funded program,
launched in 2003, to demonstrate high-bandwidth chip-to-chip interconnects
through polymer waveguides integrated on a printed circuit board. Further
details of this work will be provided in the following two presentations at the
2008 Optical Fiber Communications Conference in San Diego, CA:
Clint Schow
"300-Gb/s, 24-Channel Full-Duplex, 850-nm, CMOS-Based Optical Transceivers".
Fuad Doany "Chip-to-Chip Board-Level Optical Data Buses".
Source:
IBM
               
               
               

本文来自ChinaUnix博客，如果查看原文请点：http://blog.chinaunix.net/u/22778/showart_489432.html